(Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award) This exquisite novel from writer, filmmaker, and ordained Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki—the author of the Kiriyama Prize winner My Year of Meats and the American Book Award winner All Over Creation—is "funny, tragic, hard-edged, and ethereal all at once" (LATimes). In Tokyo, 16-year-old Nao has decided to escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends her life, Nao plans first to tell the story of her great-grandmother—a Buddhist nun who has lived more than a century—in the diary she means to leave behind. Across the Pacific, on a remote island, a novelist named Ruth discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox after the 2011 tsunami, including Nao's diary.

"As contemporary as a Japanese teenager's slang but as ageless as a Zen koan, Ruth Ozeki's new novel combines great storytelling with a probing investigation into the purpose of existence.... She plunges us into a tantalizing narration that brandishes mysteries to be solved and ideas to be explored.... Ozeki's profound affection for her characters makes A Tale for the Time Being as emotionally engaging as it is intellectually provocative."—Washington Post

"Many of the elements of Nao's story—schoolgirl bullying, unemployed suicidal 'salarymen,' kamikaze pilots—are among a Western reader's most familiar images of Japan, but in Nao's telling, refracted through Ruth's musings, they become fresh and immediate, occasionally searingly painful. Ozeki takes on big themes ... all drawn into the stories of two 'time beings,' Ruth and Nao, whose own fates are inextricably bound."—NYTBR